Absolutely it's nothing new, it's just a case of the scale of the problem being larger than ever. IO speed increases haven't kept up with floating operation per

Absolutely it's nothing new, it's just a case of the scale of the problem being larger than ever. IO speed increases haven't kept up with floating operation performance of processors. If you're performing operations on a large, distributed dataset it's easier than ever to have your processor be data starved. Of course, that's why any decent HPC system will include high speed local data stores such as an SSD and plenty of RAM. That's why cache size on these processors is important. That's why systems are more heterogeneous than ever. I feel like some writers in HPC (ironically) miss the free lunch of faster and faster systems with not much extra effort. With more complexity in your supercomputer comes more power and more difficulty in writing software. That's unavoidable.